


symbols

by MaryPSue



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Coda, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:26:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23833087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryPSue/pseuds/MaryPSue
Summary: After the apocalypse-that-wasn’t, Mako stops dying her hair blue.
Relationships: Raleigh Becket & Mako Mori
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	symbols

**Author's Note:**

> Crossposting some old things that never got brought over from tumblr.

After the apocalypse-that-wasn’t, Mako stops dying her hair blue.

Raleigh tries to uncover the symbolism in this gesture but he never was any good at symbolism, failed two English classes in a row because he couldn’t wrap his head around what was so fascinating about an apple, or a green light, or a gold-plated pen, or someone’s mother’s house. But he _tries_ , something he wouldn’t have done before, because he’s seen how a little red shoe can be so much more than a shoe. Can be the whole world.

He mentions that the blue’s fading, one day, because it is, leaving behind a colour that’s not quite a colour. The patches of rich, royal blue, tropical skies, Mediterranean waters, have turned ghostly and washed-out, colour of memory. Mako just half-smiles and bobs her head slightly, acknowledgement. She knows. She does nothing about it.

People trickle back into the coastal areas. ‘Course, huge chunks of the coastline are still uninhabitable, bombed to wasteland in the first desperate years, and the PPDC still keep a weather eye on the Pacific, but as days and weeks bleed into months and no sign of stirring comes from the scar on the ocean floor that was once a door to another world, life begins to fall back into familiar rhythms. People adapt, it’s what people do. This time next year the Jaegers’ll be scrap, Oblivion Bay picked clean for parts and precious metals. This time next year the PPDC will be a defunct acronym, standing for nothing more than does an apple, or a gold-plated pen. Or a little red shoe. Memory, past so deep you can drown in it, and nothing more.

One night, curled on the couch, watching the news with one-half of his brain still waiting for the shrill of the alarm to send them running, Raleigh runs his fingers through Mako’s fading hair and says, “You should dye it red.”

She turns, grins up at him, and the spark in her eye is just as good as the drift at telling him what she thinks. “Candy apple?”

“I was thinking cherry,” he says, and she laughs sunlight.

...

Yancy’s memories were snow-blinding, tasted of wideness and wildness and the blue of a sky that had never known light pollution. Yancy’s thoughts crystallized on the tongue, froze Raleigh’s eyelashes together and filled his nose with the tang of salt and surf. The landscape inside their heads was the same, and when Yancy was torn out of it, he left a ragged, blizzard-howling black hole where the peace of tundra should have been.

Raleigh thought that no one would ever fill it.

Mako doesn’t. But Mako doesn’t need to. There is no ice in Mako’s thoughts, no trackless wilderness. Her memories are smoke and choking dust, panic that clogs his throat; her thoughts are organized as the intricate workings of a circuit board or the streets of a city where, at times, you can’t even see the sky. And she lights up neon when she smiles.

Mako isn’t ice. Mako is fire.


End file.
